Hong Kong on high alert after first human case of H7N9 bird flu

:chicken:

Oh great, it's not like Hong Kong is a major hub for international air travel or anything....

Avian Flu? Evian Flu??

NAIVE FLU???

Of all of the dooms, the pandemic dooms freak me out the most.

Something on a terrifying global scale would be pretty easy to engineer and impossible to contain and could be incredibly effective at not only taking out millions if not billions of people but also creating a global panic and chaos unlike anything we've ever witnessed.

I don't trust TPTB, I don't trust their flu shot campaigns or any random accidental looking outbreaks of novel viruses.

And like you said, when something happens in a major travel hub like Hong Kong you have to start asking yourself how long the incubation period is, how many other people 'patient zero' could have come into contact with and how far this thing could have already spread by the time the first case is noticed.

I mean, especially during this season, how many people go to their doctor and get diagnostic testing at the first sign of a flu? They do their best to take care of it themselves and potentially infect dozens if not hundreds of other people in the process. If they are unknowing carriers of a deadly novel strain instead of your average seasonal influenza, the idea of 'containment' is squashed before the first case is diagnosed properly.

In our "just in time shipping" world, food supplies would become an issue immediately. Public utilities would begin to fail as workers become ill or stay home to protect their own health and their family's safety. Even law enforcement and fire responders would vanish. And all that is on top of fighting the illness.

Not a pretty picture, and it could happen in just a few weeks span of time.

Here is an important book you may want to open (I read it cover to cover about ten years ago):
[link to www.amazon.com]

...as an interesting side note, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Laurie Garrett, has gone on to work for the Council on Foreign Relations, hmmmm....

I'll have to grab that.

And you are absolutely right, the way our world runs means that if we get a big supply-chain disruption it will impact millions quickly and indefinitely.

Yeah, pandemic is pretty scary. That's why biological warfare is the worst of the worst.

It wouldn't take long for it to become an every man for himself scenario if we got hit with something with a high mortality rate and no vaccine, that's for sure.